During an image-guided medical procedure, an image-guided surgical navigation system may correlate a position of a previously acquired patient image with a physical position of the patient. To facilitate the correlation, surgical navigation systems may rely upon optical tracking of landmark features of the patient's anatomy or may rely upon reference markers affixed to the patient's anatomy for integrating the patient image with the patient position into a common coordinate space.
The common coordinate space may be formed by amalgamating a virtual coordinate space and an actual coordinate space. The virtual coordinate space may be defined as a coordinate space in which virtual representation of objects exist. The actual coordinate space may be defined as the space where actual objects, such as the patients or surgical instruments, exist. Thus, correlation of the patient image with the physical position of the patient is accomplished through the process of registration. Ensuring accuracy of registration is desirable and necessary for maintaining confidence of the information presented to the medical professional during the image-guided medical procedure.